skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Action taken between September 25 and October 2 resulted in the shutdown of more than 18,000 illegal pharmacy websites

I wonder if this means that 18,000 domain names were seized. And, I'd also love to see the list, given that the US has a tendency to add a few pet project domains to these seizure-fests.
Not 12 billion - the number just needs to greater than the number of computer/internet users on earth.
I agree, that particular image really reminds me of roots of some sort (though obviously if you zoom in, they're not really roots). However, in this other picture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mars_Global_Surveyor_1.jpg the structure really looks more like a Diffusion Limited Aggegrate ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion-limited_aggregation ), which can also be generated by non-living chemical processes.

I'm not sure if these two pictures are of the same phenomenon, actually?
Well I suspect they get a commission which makes them so patient with the ones they have a possibility of extracting money from.
How so? The fact that the company is attempting to minimize legal liability doesn't mean that the contractor was truthful.

Nor does it mean that people who estimated that P(story = true | writer sounds racist) < P(story = true) were incorrect.
this guy on ubuntu trolled them well http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSFRtPus3DQ
The biggest disability on the internet is communications. As such a interface that transcends the needs to have any written language is one that is doing more than most.

That is why the up vote and down vote buttons are what is known as intuitive is use.

But if you design something with KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) then you can at least have a good interface to tap into.

I would love a site that allowed you to go into edit mode and drag and drop and move and select the elements of the site you wanted and had that as a default style sheet for that site. You can then have voted user style sheets/templates for the site that enable somebody who is say colour-blind to select the one best for them. Though for colour blindness I'm surprised none of these smart TV's have the ability for the user to custom remap aspects of the colour palate to accommodating them. Though I'm not colour blind, but it is a common enough issue and a fine solvable example with regards towards a accommodative user interface.
A tainted VM would be a lot more fun and easier to execute.

One thing I've seen from using various TeamViewer and LMI apps is that poor quality connections can cause frustrating issues.

A few things like a mouse driver that sporadically moves the mouse exactly opposite of the way they are trying to move it ("Not sure why it does that, maybe because I bought this PC in Australia and everything is upside down there"). Icons and a desktop background that look like the artifacts you get from poor connections (wrong colors, smearing, etc.).

Random popups on the screen with things like "Fraudulent Windows Support Department detected. IP trace from FBI in progress!!".
The ultimate Android Nexus news report
Beginning with such a simplified list proves useful. I would say the first point has to be "Are there 'existing' solutions to this (Architecture) Problem? If yes, what are they & what are their pros & cons?"
It always surprises me (& I learnt from a wise man & my mentor) that you aren't the first one (& almost never alone) when you encounter any problem.
From what I can tell, Harbin seems like A Good Bloke. It doesn't surprise me to hear of the brogrammer environment given the way they've marketed (the YouTube video, recruitment flyers with Insanity Wolf on), but it's good that he stepped up quickly.
The societal impact of quantum computing would be immense -- the entire security infrastructure of the web would have to be rebuilt from the ground up.

However, many experts -- including Scott Aaronson (who is mentioned in the article) -- have cast doubt on D-Wave's claims, because the company has not yet proved that its machines are producing results by exploiting quantum phenomena like particle entanglement and superposition. In other words, D-Wave's devices may very well be different, but still classical, computers. D-Wave's engineers acknowledge as much: they are quoted in the article stating that "they don't yet know for sure what's happening inside the chip."

The fact that Bezos, a very smart guy, has invested in D-Wave, has changed my perception of the company from "these are likely crazy people making outrageous claims" to "maybe these guys are unto something." Exciting and a bit scary. Time will tell.
Facebook Vs. Twitter
From their post, they're complaining about Facebook disabling their fan page without explanation while littering the same item with unattributed images.

I've had work in the past posted to their site without attribution and it was a headache to get them to either attribute it or remove it (they chose the latter).

It seems rather obvious why their Facebook account was disabled.
I'm disappointed to see that the earth maps from Google and Nokia of my town are three years old. I saw the copyright 2012 and had heard they'd been updated through a Google posting a few weeks ago. But checking a few new construction developments, which cars are in my parents' & their neighbours driveways and its no later than June 2009.
Netflix managed to discover that the new instances cut server costs in half.

http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/benchmarking-high-perfor...

Keep in mind this is purely research and it may (or may not) have already been implemented as part of their production systems.
I too have found quite a few usable offers from lowendbox.com (LEB) and lowendtalk.com (LET). Searching the websites bring up quite a few attractive deals.

However it may be tricky to pick a good host. It is usually a good idea to look for past experiences before signing up. The community is active and helps make that decision: http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/5136/best-leb-host-q3-2...
App Store Rejects Generic YouTube Client
I used iHackerNews until http://cheeaun.github.com/hnmobile/ came out.
Sorry, probably not the right metaphor to use really. From the article, it suggested that division of Nokia was losing €1.5bn annually, and I don't think selling map software to mobile phone owners would make that much when there are already plenty of free (beer) alternatives.
I'm a fan of TACK because it gives site operators the same abilities as Google to ensure a rogue CA hasn't certified an attacker to impersonate them.

This draft makes some minor changes. One of the most important ones is that it lets you make a new TACK before unlocking the old one. This means there's no period of time in the middle, no matter how short, for an attacker to interpose a new lock.

The main site with overview is here: http://tack.io/

There are existing tools on github to start playing with this: https://github.com/tack

Here's the announcement with links to the various patches, downloads, and tools. Note that a couple links are broken, as per the followup msg.

https://lists.riseup.net/www/arc/tack/2012-09/msg00003.html

https://lists.riseup.net/www/arc/tack/2012-09/msg00004.html
Completely agree. I've turned down many offers to move in to management positions over the years. People start giving me weird looks until I explain to them that coding is my passion, and I want to do it until the day I die. Any position that takes me away from coding is pretty much an automatic no.
The Shuttle probably had similar launch windows for docking with the ISS. You need to match both the speed and position of the ISS to dock with it.

The ISS is moving at 7.7 km every second; if you miss by 10 seconds, you would need to (roughly) drop your orbit by 10km, wait 3.6 hours, then climb back up that 10km to make up for it.

Matching position is even harder. The ISS isn't equatorial. It swings north and south of the equator in a sinusoid.

It's probably possible to have a computer or pilot dynamically respond to all these things to make up for them. But easier to just deal with it by waiting a few days.
Well there's an awful lot of "demand" that's manufactured in commerce. I suspect, but have no idea, that the pitch goes something like "Nearly every window machine has performance issues that we can improve. Our methods for getting people to help us clean up their registries etc are a little unorthodox but in the end our customers have faster machines and are happy with the service" or some variation. And you're not asking too many questions if you get the chance to make 2x your other job options and talk to Westerners all day.
I understand you meant that in jest but base 1 is possible, albeit very cumbersome:

1 = 1

2 = 11

3 = 111

4 = 1111
...etc.
Git pull vs. git rebase: it’s about different engineering cultures
That was pretty awkward to watch, wasn't it.
I don't think their big contract with Lockheed Martin should be a good indicator of actual quantum computing. What they built is probably optimized for some of the problems that Lockheed Martin is trying to solve...
Damn, didn't realize that. But to be honest, it won't change my habits. I enjoy reading comics, not the actual comics themselves. I don't "collect" them, I just buy and read them, and will probably never reread a book.
Near London? Get Paid to Use Ubuntu
SimCity: 10 Minutes of Gameplay Footage
> If you end up having a car that is a bit bigger and a lot heavier than an equivalent ICE car would be, you can still sell it.

The Tesla Roadster was heavier than the Lotus car it was based on, but had quite respectable performance. That fact, combined with the electric car cachet was enough to sell it.

If they can keep putting the batteries in the floor, they could consistently wind up with a roomier and more versatile vehicle than the equivalent ICE car. Then again, what Ford is doing with Ecoboost is very impressive. I suspect there's a lot of untapped potential for different form factors with ICE technology.
Having worked as a relay operator for the deaf and hard of hearing, I can not tell you how bad forms are in virtually all software.

When calling a deaf person, you may need to call a relay or translation service, meaning two phone numbers. Virtually no company, even those with a "notes" area have an established protocol for this. And many just don't have even that.

And no notes is a huge pain. You know how it's a pain in the ass to get the cable/Internet guy to come at a convenient time? They often insist on calling first to ensure their trip isn't wasted. Now imagine you're deaf, and the guy calls every time, and he doesn't use a relay/translator, and never actually communicating... He never comes.

God it has to be annoying sometimes. It was for me and I was getting paid for those calls.
That's why they include which features they used, which is educational.
I told the guy who called me "If you are going to keep doing this, the world would be a better place if you get run over by a bus. How does that make you feel?"
I'm running Chrome and get it also; I assume from the way they're listing operating systems it must be Linux that they think is the problem. Goodness knows why though, since the little play button shows me a HTML5 video and I'm pretty sure I saw a WebGL maps demo from Nokia just the other day?
It could also be that they're trying to filter out people who know "Windows support" sounds dodgy. This also fits with the fact that they still seem to all have Indian accents -- an immediate off-put to those who have heard about these scams. People who don't hang up when they hear the words "Windows support" coming from someone with an Indian accent would probably be very much more likely to fall for it.
Autodesk acquires Qontext’s social collaboration software technology and team
It's not about who's right and who's wrong. It's about who has the power.

The Kixeye CEO did exactly the right thing for his shareholders. He's also going to make a large payment to the OP, which will enable this obvious professional victim to live for years off his month of work. This is also the right thing to do - for the shareholders.

The lesson for hiring managers is that you have to be very careful when hiring a member of a "protected class." You are effectively hiring them for a different position than your ordinary second-class citizens.

It's not illegal to be an asshole to an ordinary second-class citizen. But a member of a protected class is effectively a noble, and a different set of legal norms apply to him. It is illegal to be an asshole to a member of this nobility. America is a nation of laws, and you have to follow the law. Kudos to the Kixeye CEO for realizing this.

Why isn't it illegal for anyone to be an asshole to anyone else? A fascinating question. Worth thinking about.

(And don't ask me how our country got to have "protected classes" at the same time as it got "equal protection under the law." Actually, the latter is legally derived from the former - believe it or not.)
Although Grover's algorithm is extremely impressive...it's a probabilistic algorithm, which means that the result is not guaranteed, but very likely. And the likelihood can be increased by running the algorithm more than once.
“While it’s clear that not everything in the blog post was accurate, I did discover examples of embarrassing behavior that I find inappropriate for Kixeye, or any other work environment."

It is clear in context that "embarrassing behavior" refers to racially charged conduct, that being the through-line of the whole story in which the CEO is publicly commenting and disclosing employee terminations.

If they wanted to minimize legal liability, saying nothing would have made more sense than publicly disclosing "embarrassing behavior" that lead to termination.

I know this sounds like more tea-leaf reading and I am myself continually exasperated by the tea-leaf prognostications HN gives rise to in other stories, but the CEO of a large-ish company publicly stating, in the wake of notorious claim of racial prejudice at their firm, that the company fired people for their behavior... that's a Big Deal.
Whether I'm still programming when I'm 50 (currently 33, programming for about 20 years), will depend on whether I have the same appetite for being wrong that I do today. To constantly program, you have to constantly learn, and to constantly learn, you have to constantly be confronted with the fact that you're doing it wrong. Not using the right API, the right language, the latest technique, etc. The best programmers are the best learners.

The author here doesn't seem to be particularly passionate about learning from his battles with Hard Problems. I don't blame him, because it's hard and painful to be in a constant battle. But for my part, I hope that I still have a taste for the pain of learning when I'm 50; the day I stop wanting to learn is the day I become bored & boring.
I'm also cofounder of matchist.com, and wanted to weigh in here. This is somewhat of a Jason Fried question...do you want to scale as quickly as possible? Should every business strive to be the biggest or greatest? Or is it more important to find a niche and just do that one thing really well. That's our philosophy building matchist...we don't plan to be the one stop shop for freelancers.
The border of Prospect Heights and Crown Heights around Franklin Ave. might be a good fit for you. It is relatively affordable, somewhat close to Prospect Park, and around some cool places.

Fort Greene and Clinton Hill are really wonderful neighborhoods. It is a bit more expensive, but you can stumble upon some "gems" from time to time.

Best wishes and welcome! :-)
They are just going to have to take media licensing more seriously, why do they think they deserve a hall pass, especially considering their whole brand is build upon the work of others.
If it's close (8 billion), people will likely ignore it as either a rounding/math/counting error, or as "those people who have a 2nd account for their dog".
What about all the existing subscriptions that will no longer work? That would be a nightmare for any blogger/podcaster.
FK combines average sentence length (total words/total sentences), average syllables per word and some fixed coefficients to come up with an equivalent school grade.

Flesch Reading Ease score, which is what I actually meant, does the same but with different coefficients to come up with a more granular difficulty score, usually in the range of 30-100.

They're both pretty arbitrary. The more I read up on this subject the more respect I have for the author's own attempts at an originality score. It's all subjective ultimately.
I'm curious what your 10000 twitter accounts are doing.
Huge upvote for Carlos Bueno's Lauren Ipsum (aka HN'er aristus).

I first heard about this book on HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2144526), when it was just a few chapters. I read them to my daughter, Laurel. She thought it was soooo cool and told him so. He actually wrote in a bit part about Lauren saying "My name's not Laurel!" and sent Laurel an autographed copy.

My kids went on to read the whole book with my parents over VTC (is that the category for FaceTime and Skype?), and it was a huge success. My mom happens to be a college math teacher and has turned a number of other faculty on to the book.

For those interested in this genre, there is also Computational Fairy Tales (http://computationaltales.blogspot.com/p/book.html)
you will found a lot of those small Web companies from poor countries on http://pivoted.co/
My own personal ghoulishness lead me to LinkedIn to see if I could spot the terminated manager from cues from the racism posts. I could not, but what I did learn is that Kixeye is stocked to the gills with people from Ivy League schools, McKinseyites, and veterans of the gaming industry. The sample I got from LinkedIn doesn't refute accusations of "bro-" culture, but it doesn't strongly indicate rampant 4chanism or racism. Without intending undue reverence for b-school, you probably don't graduate HBS and work for several years at McKinsey and retain the belief that a culture of jocular bigotry is an asset to a growing San Francisco tech company.
That doesn't make a senseless analogy any less senseless. I didn't say "you shouldn't talk about how many users facebook has", in fact I talked about how many they have. I said that the analogy he made doesn't make any sense. Facebook isn't comparable to cable, it is comparable to a channel.
Browser makers failed us when they introduced CSS.
Yeah, if you use the same raw RGB features for the SVM as the neural net then the neural net would blow the SVMs away even more utterly.
I wonder if Apple has lost more value from the map debacle than Nokia's entire marketcap. Apple's stock is down ~25-30B dollars since the the iphone 5 came out, and Nokia is worth 10B.
"there's no way of enforcing these workflows or practices other than out-of-band social conventions"

I think this is exactly what Linus intended when he designed Git. He explained in a Google talk the way he controls what is committed to the kernel is by just pulling from people he trusts.

If you try to use git as a centralized version control system you lose control of what gets pushed regardless of how many rules and workflows you setup. Have devs send pull requests instead and don't accept/merge bad commits.
I'd suggest trying to get the email address and any other personal info. of the scammer. Tell them you have an office with 200 PC's and they're all infected. Tell them you want to buy their software for all of your PC's. Try to get bank wire/routing info or a mailing address to send payment. Then report to FTC, DHS, FBI, et al.
Agreed. They're not even competitors.
Unfortunately, it's not a Big Deal for someone to get fired for mistaking a pendant for a calculator. That sort of thing happens all the time. You know, in the country we live in.

It would certainly be a Big Deal if we lived in a country controlled by the Vast White Racist Conspiracy. Actually, San Francisco is especially notable for its deeply entrenched racism. The KKK has a huge office on Market Street, right next to Twitter - you can't miss it.
Startups in the valley seem almost by definition, segregated places to work. I don't think it is intentional (or maybe in the case of Kixeye it was), but the vast majority of companies seem to have straight white males in their 20's as employees. What this means is that people who do not have "critical mass", ie any few numbers of minorities, are going to count the number people just like them. It will also mean stereotypes will be at their worst. Do startups hire programmers in their 50's? Do startups that make products "for women" try to hire women to work on that product? Why is it that black engineers and non-native English speaking engineers are in positions like QA and testing, but not program management? These are just a few of the trends I've noticed.
Linking to facebook accounts.
That's a good idea. I feel one of the biggest reasons I did as well as I did in grade school history classes was how often I played Age of Empires II and Civilization III. The in-game manual for Civ was particularly interesting, since every unit and mechanic also had a second, historical article covering that topic. It was almost like a subset of Encarta.
You would think the mark (if they know the difference) would say "You just told me I have a virus, so you should know that."
I agree with your retirement point but Telsa didn't exactly get satisfaction from the achievements of Edison while working for him.
Turning Makers Into Middle Class Manufacturers
If the guy had been white and everybody had been racist toward him because of that, it would have been just as illegal.
gerrit's permission system goes a good ways in the direction you're talking about. (Unfortunately, it's rather baroque and poorly documented.) You can specify who can submit patches, who can approve them, who can merge, whether a repository allows merges at all or requires rebasing or cherry-picking, etc.
Three Aspects of Temporal Data
> 18,000 illegal pharmacy websites and the seizure of $10.5 million worth of drugs

What a fail... $583 in drugs per "illegal" website shutdown. I really don't like the US being the world police and it seems like they always do so on behalf of giant US based corporations (MegaUpload comes to mind, the counterfeit jersey bust, etc). Very dangerous territory.

Update: In other news, the DOJ announced a huge bust on Medicare fraud today to the tune of $430 million (and all that fraud is from just 91 people!). This is a real crime and it actually costs taxpayers money instead of the theoretical losses of a US based company.

http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2012/October/12-ag-1205.html
This looks really neat. Is there a release date yet?
My God. Say what you will about affirmative action and discrimination law, but I assure you that minorities and women do not feel like "nobles" in America.
Neatly executed ! & a nice idea! Few suggestions:

1. Actions seem to lead user across several pages ; IMO, they could be done in a single page (for example, managing an already-added-twitter-account).

2. When I invite someone, you seem to auto-create an ID for their email id. Am not sure if (a) this might end up creating a lot of unused/spam Fatnest accounts, (b) the user (who is invited by email) may not really like it, because he/she might or might not 'actually want' to sign up.